Jake Bal

Catch Jake on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick, 26th October - 1st November 2026.

Jake Bal, Clinician Executive and Health Economics Researcher

Jake Bal is a Maryland-based speech-language pathologist, healthcare leader and doctoral researcher whose work centres on opening up care to the people who need it most. Day to day he works with children and families at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, a non-profit paediatric hospital in Baltimore, in a city where many of the families he sees are on low incomes. Behind that clinical work sits an unusually wide view of the system. He has spent years in administrative and operational roles keeping an organisation financially steady through a decade of economic ups and downs, and has worked on the revenue side of healthcare. He also knows it from the other side of the desk, as a patient and a caregiver.

A healthcare-focused MBA at Yale introduced him to health economics, and to the paradox that has stayed with him since. When America’s anti-smoking campaigns succeeded, overall healthcare spending went up, because people who no longer died in their forties and fifties went on to live with dementia, Parkinson’s and the long, costly conditions of later life. This autumn he began a PhD in Health Economics and Policy at Lancaster University. Part of the draw was the chance to set the US system he knows inside out alongside the NHS. He isn’t trying to transplant one into the other. He wants to learn honestly what each gets right and what each gets wrong.

What he wants to change is what he calls a “sick care” system: one that pays out once people fall ill rather than investing in keeping them well. His ideas are practical rather than utopian. He suggests insurance premiums that fall when you go for a walk three times a week, and food treated as medicine. He sees a role for AI in taking the paperwork off clinicians so they can return to their patients, and in offering a second-best option where no doctor is within reach, since that beats having nothing at all. Underneath all of it is trust, which he has come to believe no system can work without.

In conversation with Mike, speaking over Zoom from Baltimore after the morning preschool drop-off, Jake picks up a thread from the Vienna panel on AI and compassion where the two first met. Along the way they take in the longevity paradox, universal basic income, the UK’s Incredible Edible gardens and social prescribing, and Adam Grant’s case for taking joy in being wrong. He also explains why lasting change doesn’t need a seat at the table in Washington or Westminster. It only needs enough people willing to start where they are, because small things add up.